Jalal ad-Dawlah

Sultan Jalal (1040-11) was the first Sultan of the Sultanate of Rum, a Muslim empire based in Anatolia (Turkey). Jalal was religiously proper, intelligent, an aspiring commander, and a night fighter. He used these skills to carve out an empire that reached from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean Coast, as far north as Georgia and as far south as Arabia.

Biography
Jalal was born to a Seljuk slave-soldier family, serving as a Ghulam in the army of Malik Shah. He married Islah (b. 1042), a fitting young woman of noble birth, and became a noble in the Seljuk Empire, and in 1080, founded the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum with its capital at Iconium. Jalal's empire started out with the regions of Yerevan, Caesarea, Iconium, and Mosul, while many Seljuk warlords refused to side with him in the initial power struggle. Jalal's campaigns brought him Tbilisi in 1082, Edessa in 1084, Smyrna in 1088, Damascus in 1096, Trebizond and Aleppo in 1100, and Adana in 1102. However, his empire in the Levant was damaged when Jerusalem, Antioch, and Edessa were captured by the crusaders in the First Crusade in 1097-1098, and he spent the last years of his life fighting the Crusaders and the Byzantine Empire.